Perceptual audio coders are used in many applications including Digital Radio and Television, Digital Sound on Film, Multimedia/Internet Audio, Portable Devices, and Electronic Music Distribution (EMD). This Workshop integrates digital signal processing, psychoacoustics, and programming to provide the basis for understanding and building perceptual audio coding systems. The first part of the workshop presents the basic principles underlying all the core components of a perceptual audio coding system. In the second part, design choices applied in state-of-the-art audio coding schemes, e.g. AC-3 (aka Dolby Digital); MPEG Layers I, II, and III (MP3); MPEG Advanced Audio Coding (AAC); MPEG-4 are presented; time permitting MPEG Surround and Unified Speech and Audio Coding (USAC) will be also discussed. In-class demonstrations will allow students to hear the quality of state-of-the-art implementations at varying data rates and they will be programming their own simple perceptual audio coder during the workshop.